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“Because if I heal you, then you’ll hear my voice. My song.” He signs fluently now. “What happened to the people above will happen to you. When I sang for them during the sickness, they got well. They became addicted to my song, though. They came to the ruins, left food, knelt, and held ceremonies. They stopped being able to tell wanting me from needing me, and in the end, they stopped trying to tell the difference at all.”

“And you think I’d become like them.”

“I think anyone who hears me long enough becomes like them. It isn’t about strength. Your body would start to need my voice. Then you’d want to stay, and you wouldn’t know whether you were choosing it or whether leaving had become unbearable. You’d call it love. I’d never know if it was real.”

I look at the letters at my feet and spot the one where Callum begs for a Mercy. I think of the padded room and the warmth that spread through my chest while Mordred sang with me. That was the effect of his voice on my body even if I couldn’t hear him.

“Does that mean your plan is to let me go?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“When?”

“At the start, I meant to keep you a few days. Long enough to heal you, feed you, and find a safe way to send you up.” He signs more slowly. “Then I kept putting it off. For the first time in my long existence, someone was living with me. Every night, I told myself tomorrow. Every morning, you came out of your room, and I couldn’t send you away.”

“My room,” I say, nodding. “The gowns, the makeup, the jewelry… everything. Who was she?”

“There was no one before you,” he signs.

“Don’t lie to me again.”

“There was no one, I swear it. When I first came down here, before there was a town above me, I was pulling what I could out of the dressing rooms. One of the doors had a plaque on it that said Prima Donna. I told myself the room had belonged to her, so I brought everything here, built a bedroom for her and a bathing chamber. I started saying her name out loud, so I’d have something to say. I started talking to her, pretending that she was here. A companion.”

I remember my first day here. He wrote Prima on a scrap of paper, and I said yes, I used to be one. He wasn’t asking about my past. He was asking me if I was… her. His imagination become reality.

“I’ve been alone down here for about a hundred years,” he signs. “I furnished her room a piece at a time. At first, I took a chair from a box, a mirror from a dressing room, and a gown I thought she’d like. Then it became… what you see now. Every morning, I went in and said good morning to her. I chose a dress and laid it on the bed. I carried it out here and set it in the chair you’re sitting in, and I put her shoes under the hem. I told her what I’d seen in town, I asked her what she thought. I imagined her answering me and laughing together.”

He stops signing, and I wait for him to go on. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know why both my chest and my stomach are aching.

“At night, I took the gown back to her room, wished her good dreams, and closed the door. I always knew she wasn’t real. I never once thought she was. I did it anyway, because the other choice was this house with no one in it. The night you came, I put her nightdress on the bed before I went out to the lake. That’s what all of it is. I made her up, and then they lowered you down in a cage.”

My hands unclench. My fingers twitch, and I find that I want to touch his cold, porcelain mask, his long, black hair. I want to place my hand on his head and pull him in until he’s resting on my knee.

I think about what he’s done since that night. He gave me the bed he’d kept made up for a woman who doesn’t exist. He learned my language when no one in Rosemere had even tried. He showed me the scores he composed and let me sing them without knowing how I sounded. He never locked a door, not even the one to his bedroom. Since the fire, no one has made me feel wanted, and I’ve grown fonder of him than I’ve let myself admit. He lied to me, but can I blame him?

“My burns,” I say. “You told me they were hard to heal because the damage was deep. You told me you weren’t sure you could.”

“That was another lie,” he signs.

“Why?”

“At first, I didn’t heal them because I thought you were beautiful as you were. They didn’t take anything away.”

“I hated them. It was obvious. I told you how ugly they made me feel. I said I was sorry you had to look at me.”

“I heard you.” He comes forward on his knees, slowly, until he’s at my feet. He settles his hands on my ankles above the slippers. “I was selfish. I thought if you were healed, you’d have one less reason to stay. I thought a woman with your beautiful face would walk out of here and never look back, and I couldn’t stand it, so I let you go on hating yourself.”

I don’t pull away. The cool of his hands seeps into my skin, and a buzzing warmth spreads up my calves, over the backs of my knees, and gathers between my thighs. An ache starts in my lower belly that I have no name for. I’ve never felt it for anyone. I want him, and I want his hands higher. I want to know what he’d do if I let him. Then I remember why he’s on the floor and redirect my wandering mind.

I stand, and his hands slide off my ankles.

I walk to the table where the covered tray is still untouched, then to the closed door of his room, and back to the hearth. I’m pacing. I try to think of him as a man, and I can’t.

He is a god who sang until every sick person above got well. He is a creature who set a table for two and tucked shoes under a hem for someone who never existed. He is a monster who left me scarred so I wouldn’t leave.

His loneliness helps me understand every one of those choices. Understanding them doesn’t excuse a single one. I can’t imagine what a century alone does to anyone. I’m angry, all the same, that he let his suffering decide what happened to me and my freedom.

“You don’t add up to one person for me.” I know it’s a strange thing to say. “You are… all these things, good and bad. Contradictory, but somehow, they make sense.”